The present invention relates to data center management and file systems, and more specifically, this invention relates to using virtual Enhanced Transmission Selection (vETS) for lossless Ethernet.
Currently available virtual Ethernet switches, which are implementations of full Layer-2/Layer-3 Ethernet switches in software, also known as soft switches or hypervisor switches) do not support the ability to schedule packet transmission according to a priority of the packet or traffic flow (also known as priority scheduling) and the selection of how to utilize the available throughput of the devices in the network (also known as bandwidth allocation).
Physical networking switches (as opposed to virtual switches) offer this functionality through the Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) portion of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers standard (IEEE 802.1 Qaz). Virtual switches normally treat all network traffic in a similar or the same manner, and as a result different virtual networks do not recognize traffic priorities (or worse, different virtual networks may have conflicting priorities overlaying the same physical network). Accordingly, it would be beneficial to implement the analogous function on virtual switches; however, there are problems associated with implementing priority scheduling and bandwidth allocation in virtual switches.